Quilts & Tapestries
by Thom Atkins
Beads
are another love of mine. I have been working off and on with them for
some thirty years, starting with jewelry and adding bead embroidery and
most recently, embellished quilts. One of my mentors has been my sister,
*Robin
Atkins, teacher, friend, and fellow beadophile. It was under her tutelage
that I learned bead embroidery. I have adapted the basic embroidery stitches
for the application of beads to quilts. The work here spans three years
and began with a car accident.
I was rear-ended on the freeway and couldn’t do any sculpture for
more than six months. I could, however, manage fabric and beads. Not
one to sit idle, I began to explore the relationships between beaded
and quilted surfaces and how they relate. I wanted to see beads as an
integral part of the design, not just sitting on the surface. Beads and
fabric complementing one another, neither one predominating, balanced.
These quilts are some of the results of my explorations.
